Advances in surface-wave tomography for near-surface applications

Surface-wave (SW) tomography is a technique that has been widely used in the field of seismology. It can provide higher resolution relative to the classical multichannel SW processing and inversion schemes that are usually adopted for near-surface applications. Nevertheless, the method is rarely used in this context, mainly due to the long processing times needed to pick the dispersion curves as well as the inability of the two-station processing to discriminate between higher SW modes. To make it efficient and to retrieve pseudo-2D/3D S-wave velocity (VS) and P-wave velocity (VP) models in a fast and convenient way, we develop a fully data-driven two-station dispersion curve estimation, which achieves dense spatial coverage without the involvement of an operator. To handle higher SW modes, we apply a dedicated time-windowing algorithm to isolate and pick the different modes. A multimodal tomographic inversion is applied to estimate a VS model. The VS model is then converted to a VP model with the Poisson’s ratio estimated through the wavelength-depth method. We apply the method to a 2D seismic exploration data set acquired at a mining site, where strong lateral heterogeneity is expected, and to a 3D pilot data set, recorded with state-of-the-art acquisition technology. We compare the results with the ones retrieved from classical multichannel analysis.